Ciment's Act of God is a compact, droll farce, light-hearted and pleasurable as a chocolate truffle, yet with a nugget of hard, somewhat unpalatable truths in the center. It is propelled into motion by a conceit that echoes, in what I am sure is a deliberate way, Jack Finney's classic The Body Snatchers.

Clariel has been in the works since 1998, just building up in the queue of books to be written. When I was writing Lirael, I made a note about one of the characters and that was the beginning of Clariel. It's been lurking there, just waiting. I only work things out as I need them, typically. People often ask me, 'So you left it for years.' No, it's always been in my head.

Sykes may seem like a videogame designer more obsessed with quantity than quality, but here's the rub: this brash, prolific wordsmith has a natural eloquence that grabbed my attention and refused to let go, over the course of almost 600 pages.

I can't imagine writing anything without magic because it wouldn't be fun for me. I love the sense of wonder in fantasy. Even in dark fantasy there's a whole opening-yourself-to-wonder when magic is a factor. It gives me a sense of wonder when I write, to have a fan≠tasy element. In general my philosophy of writ≠ing is I want to write smart, fun books. I want them to be both.

Trigger Warning contains perhaps a half dozen of his strongest short fictions and a handful of rather hasty ones, but by the time we're done with it we feel like we've been celebrating not only Gaiman's considerable imaginative skills, but also those of Gene Wolfe, Jack Vance, Arthur C. Clarke, Ray Bradbury...

The fact that toward the book's end Alice, revitalized, has written a novel titled The Man with the Compound Eyes speaks to the way in which larger cosmic forces flow through all living things, redeeming their inevitable losses, even through such seemingly crass instruments as a horde of seaborne trash.

Bestsellers from specialty bookstores are led by Patrick Rothfuss' The Slow Regard of Silent Things, George R.R. Martin's A Game of Thrones and Patrick Rothfuss' The Name of the Wind, Andy Weir's The Martian, and titles by Justin Richards and R.A. Salvatore.

Allow me to now propose the McDevitt ramble, which wanders through time more than space, rummaging around in the apparently empty areas of a deep past, retrieving objects and records, reconstructing lost stories, and filling in blank spots.

Reviews of stories in new issues of Lightspeed, Uncanny, Clarkesworld, Unlikely Story, and Diabolical Plots, with recommendations of stories by Vajra Chandrasekera and Chen Qiufan (translated by Ken Liu)

It's hard to overstate just how efficient surveillance has become in the 21st century. Critics of mass Internet surveillance like to compare the NSA and its allied spy services to the Stasi, the secret police of the former East Germany, who were notorious for the pervasive and suffocating blanket of surveillance with which they smothered the country. But the Stasi were engaged in pre-Internet surveillance, and they were very expensive guard labor by modern standards.

March features interviews with Garth Nix and Stephanie Burgis, a new column by Cory Doctorow, lists of forthcoming books through December, awards and publishing news, and reviews of short fiction and books by Neil Gaiman, Sam Sykes, Paul McAuley, Benjamin Percy, Jonatham Lethem, and many others.

That is precisely what Ian Weir has done with Will Starling. He's taken the kind of nascently-pre-Victorian narrative that might have been written by Fielding or Richardson or their slightly later compatriots (the book takes place in 1816), with that mode's picaresque, loquacious, directly-address-the audience-baggy-pants-style, and created a new instance of such.

by Gary Westfahl

To epitomize the experience of watching The Lazarus Effect, then, imagine a new film adaptation of Sinclair Lewis's Arrowsmith (1925) in which Dr. Martin Arrowsmith, after years of quiet, painstaking medical research, somehow makes a mistake and ends up creating the Incredible Hulk.

These 16 stories, mostly of novelette length, aspire to resuscitate not only the obsolete, imaginary planetology of Old Venus, but the iconography and tropes that filled the pulp adventure stories once set there...

Whereas C was somewhat old school and massive, a big canvas with lots of characters, Satin Island is slim and bleeding edge, almost a claustrophobic monologue. But it's a compelling, fascinating monologue, probably the best J.G. Ballard book not written by JGB himself.

Trichter's noirish dystopia Love in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction is hallucinogenic naturalism, a prickly, disturbing descent into a world where only love  carnal or positronic  can offer a shelter from the artificial storms.

Reviews of stories in new issues of Lightspeed, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Strange Horizons, The Dark, Asimov's, and Analog, with recommendations of stories by Will Kaufman, Patricia Russo, and Kristine Kathryn Rusch

To be honest, the future of digital is print. The economics of small editions are fantastic. Print distribution isn't going away, and people are waking up to the fact that there's this fantastic engine running slightly on idle at the moment, because publishing is in a fairly difficult state.

Brian Staveley acknowledges genre tradition, yet still finds ways to undermine it. The Providence of Fire starts with a flashback connected to the title, showing royal siblings Adare, Kaden, and Valyn as children whom their father has commanded to witness an Imperial Deed from the top of a very high tower...

Clade is among the most literate and humane contributions to that slowly emerging tradition of what is sometimes called "slow apocalypse" fiction  tales that grapple with the emergent realities of climate change, species die-offs, virulent new diseases, and the inexorable pattern of the world going irreversibly to hell in a comparatively pokey handbasket.

Bestsellers from specialty bookstores are led by Patrick Rothfuss' The Slow Regard of Silent Things, George R.R. Martin's A Game of Thrones, Andy Weir's The Martian, and titles by David Mack and R.A. Salvatore.

New issues of Apex, Aphelion, Clarkesworld, Fantastic Stories of the Imagination, Fireside, GigaNotoSaurus, Intergalactic Medicine Show, Lightspeed, The New York Review of Science Fiction, Nightmare, and Quantum Muse

by Gary Westfahl

Readers of this review, at this point, might feel that I am relentlessly berating the Wachowskis for displaying a lack of originality. Yet I am theorizing that the film might have originated when one of them said, "Hey, letís remake The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, but take out all of the jokes." And that represents a genuinely original idea. More grievously, though, the Wachowskis also removed something else from The Hitchhiker's Guide, and from every other film that they borrowed from, and that is their messages.

Sometimes I think it's because the only ones of us left in this business are the writers with safety nets. The writers who have another way to eat, and have the privilege, yes, privilege, of persevering even in the face of constant rejection.

February is the 2014 Year in Review issue, with the annual Recommended Reading List, the Locus Poll & Survey ballot, and Commentary by Liza Groen-Trombi, Gary K. Wolfe, and many others; plus, an interview Simon Ings, a column by Kameron Hurley, and reviews of short fiction and books by James Bradley, Brian Staveley, Keith Stevenson, Elizabeth Bear, and many others.

What Asher delivers here is state-of-the-art SF on so many levels. This type of SF is really the litmus test for separating serious readers from, say, media fans who might groove to Guardians of the Galaxy but blanch at A.E. van Vogt or John Wright, flavors of both of whom season Asherís book.

Karen Memory is a delight, a tour-de-force of historical reimagining and character creation, and a ripping yarn full of surprises, and despite Karenís opening line, I can't imagine anyone not liking what she has to tell us.

Actual serial killers are not diabolical Hannibal Lecters. They're not super smart. Some of them can be charming and functional, but many of them are pathetic lonesome losers who feel powerless in the world. ... They're not monsters; they're vile opportunists.

My vision is to help continue the great science fiction and fantasy tradition at Harper Voyager. Voyager has been doing such an amazing job in terms of fantasy. I think one area that I'm really excited about is expanding our list a bit, specifically in terms of science fiction.

Up until page 35 of Michael Moorcock's brilliant new fabulaic book, The Whispering Swarm, you assume you are reading a straightforward roman a clef, a subtly transmogrified autobiographical memoir of a young fellow named Michael Moorcock... But then onto the mundane scene comes one Friar Isadore, a strange humble little chap who is a member of the secretive order known as the White Friars.

Van Eekhout's scrupulously crafted language continues to flaunt that Zelazny-esque balance of demotic and poetic. He is very kind to his readers by putting lots of background info up front to bring newbies up to speed. But really, this sequel is merely the second half of a single long narrative...

I can think of few authors who would try to cast a deeply intellectual psychomachia in the form of a wildly comic picaresque tall tale, and fewer still who could get away with it and have so much fun in the process.

I've always loved the Cold War and spy novels. I love the idea that there's something fake and transient about those lives. These people are ghosts. They go from hotel room to hotel room. They exist in this interstitial realm in urban society. I found that really interesting, the idea that spies live in a sub≠reality of our own...

When it comes to hard SF, a lot of my interest is rooted in the fact that science is absolutely wonderful. Once you start catching glimpses of it, it's hard not to let it capture your imagination and shake up your thinking patterns.

Last November, I published a book-length essay about how copyright is failing to serve artists, and how it has come to present a clear and present danger to wider society. The book is called Information Doesn't Want to Be Free, and it is composed of three snappy arguments...

The January issue has interviews with Lauren Beukes and Robert Jackson Bennett, a column by Cory Doctorow, spotlights on David Pomerico and Randy & Jean-Marc Lofficier, reports from Cheryl Morgan and Tobias S. Buckell, and reviews of short fiction and books by James Morrow, John Twelve Hawks, Elizabeth Bear, Ramsey Campbell, David Mitchell, and many others.

I think the notion of worldbuilding is a failure of literary sophistication. I only invent what's necessary to explain the mood of a character. I haven't thought about an imaginary world's social security system; I don't know the gross national product of Melniboné.

While World of Trouble is bleak, it is also beautiful in its own way, and redemptive. And unlike other episodic stories about the end of the world, this one pays off by the time the apocalypse arrives.

by Gary Westfahl

One might characterize this film as a charming 30-minute rendering of the last six chapters of J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit (1937) padded out with two hours of repetitive slashing, stabbing, bludgeoning, and beheading. Tolkien, one imagines, would not be pleased.

Asaro plants herself firmly into that grand SF tradition of future history franchises favored by luminaries like Heinlein, Asimov, Herbert, Anderson, Dickson, Niven, Cherryh, and Baxter. It really seems to me that any future mention of this stefnal lineage must include her name as a worthy exemplar.

The main reason The Three-Body Problem is noteworthy is that it's for the most part a compelling piece of work, brilliantly translated by Ken Liu, whose astonishing con≠trol of tone lets us experience the novel as a speculative thriller without losing the sense of Chinese language and culture that makes it uniquely different from the familiar rhythms of Western SF.

If Carol Emshwiller  oblique and delicate  had collaborated with Samuel Delany  straightforward and blunt  then the result might resemble Jennifer Brissett's impressive debut novel, Elysium, a kind of fantasia on identity and character, what is superficial and what is central to both.

I'm working with editor Navah Wolfe on the imprint, so while I do not want to speak for her, I can say that Saga Press is taking the best practices of SF/F imprints, along with select general fiction imprints and children's/YA publishing, and incorporating them into our business.

The December issue has a 75th Birthday Feature on Michael Moorcock, with an interview, tributes, and novel excerpt; plus, a report and photos on the World Fantasy Convention, lists of forthcoming books through September 2015, a new column by Kameron Hurley, and reviews of short fiction and books by Cixin Liu, Shannon Page & Jay Lake, Stephen Gould, Ben H. Winters, and others.

Sat 21 Mar

I recently launched a Kickstarter for a one-of-a-kind history-making anthology, Speculations KC for the 2016 Worldcon, a return to Kansas City after 40 years. One of the joys of moving here has been discovering the rich connections to genre history and fandom that the area has. The Midwest may so...

Thu 12 Mar

Truth: I’ve been sitting for two hours in front of this blank page, unsure where to start or what to write about. There may have been a few side trips to Facebook and Twitter during that time, but I was wracking my brain trying to come up with a subject as opposed to just talking about my short f...

(superseding the The Locus Index to Science Fiction Awards), compiled by Mark R. Kelly, includes listings, indexes, summaries, and statistics on over 100 SF, fantasy, and horror awards from 1949 to present